The Bold Frontier (40 page)

“Works for Jaggers.”

“I worked for Jaggers …”

“I know that. Don’t talk anymore. The ball must come out.” In a calm, almost stately way, Manitow rose from his crouch. His hair shimmered, black as the seepage of one of the oil springs that produced the tar trappers like Ironhand rubbed on their arthritic joints.

Without being told, Ironhand rolled over to his belly. It hurt hellishly. In the firelight a long rustfree knife sparkled in Manitow’s hand; an authentic Green River—Ironhand glimpsed the GR,
George Rex,
stamped into the blade in England. It was a knife as good as Ironhand’s own, which he’d left with his possibles bag, his bale of plews, and his carbine, in what he’d presumed was a safe clearing upstream.

Manitow laid the knife on the ground. From a pocket in his coat he took the all-purpose awl most Delaware carried. He placed this beside the knife. One or the other, or maybe both, would mine for lead in Ironhand’s back. The trapper stared at the implements with bleary eyes and made a heavy swallowing sound.

Manitow knelt beside him. With a gentle touch he lifted Ironhand’s bloody shirt high enough to expose the wound glistening with smelly salve. With the fingers of his left hand Manitow spread the dark brown edges of the wound. A swift, sharp inhale from Ironhand was the only sound.

“Be sure you get it out,” he said. “I don’t want to go down with the sun. That bastard Jaggers has to pay. Little Joe Moonlight will pay. Go ahead, dig.”

“I don’t have whiskey,” Manitow said.

“I don’t need any whiskey,” Ironhand said. “Dig.”

A night bird trilled in the darkness. Old Ironhand listened drowsily. He was coming awake; hadn’t died under Manitow’s ministrations, which had hurt infernally. He had, however, fainted at the moment the Indian worked the rifle ball out of the wound with bloody fingers, ending the ordeal.

Ironhand’s eyes fluttered open. Against a morning sky the color of lemons, Manitow crouched by the fire as he had the night before; a small dented pot, blue enamelware, sat in the embers.

A white mist floated on the high peaks. The air nipped; Manitow had found a colorful trade blanket as a coverlet for the trapper. Ironhand heard a nickering; tried to rise up.

“Your horses are safe, with mine,” Manitow said. “Your gun and plews also.” Small comfort, now that Ironhand realized the outfit was still after him.

Manitow stretched out his hand, offering a strip of
charqui,
the smoked buffalo meat that was a staple of frontiersmen. The trapper caught the meat between his teeth. He lay back, gazing at the sky, and chewed.

The enamel pot lid clinked when Manitow lifted it. “Coffee is boiling. Ready soon.”

Ironhand grunted and kept chewing. A hawk sailed in heaven, then plunged and vanished in the mists. The cold ground smelled of damp and made him think of death, not springtime. On his back under his shirt, where the Indian had prospected for lead, a thick pad of some kind told him Manitow had improvised a dressing.

“You have been a trapper for many years,” the Indian said in a reflective way.

Old Ironhand pushed the jerky into his cheek, like a cud, while he answered. “Twenty years next summer.”

“All that time. And a man stalks you and you don’t see any sign?”

“I wasn’t looking for none.”

“You didn’t hear him?”

His anger was sudden, overriding his pain. “I was in the stream. It makes noise. I was thinking about my traps. I thought the outfit was done with me. Christ, they did me enough damage—why not?”

Manitow’s grunt seemed to scorn that naive conclusion. The damn Indian made Ironhand uneasy with his quiet, unruffled manner. His air of wisdom annoyed and puzzled the trapper, because of Manitow’s relative youth.

“Done with you?” Manitow repeated. “Not when the fur trade is sickly and you steal profits from the company by working for yourself and selling to others.”

“You sure”—a gasp of pain punctuated the sentence—”seem to know a devil of a lot about me. How come?”

Ironhand’s head was rolled to the side now; his old reddened eyes stared. Almost shyly, Manitow dropped his own gaze to the smoldering fire, from which he pulled the dented pot. He poured steaming coffee into Ironhand’s own drinking cup.

“Help me sit up. Then answer my damn question.”

There followed a slow and elaborate ritual of raising him, Manitow gently pulling on his forearms rather than pushing at his back. Resting on his elbows worsened Ironhand’s pain again, but his position enabled him to suck some of the bitter hot coffee out of the cup Manitow held to his lips. At length the Indian said, “The people in the Stony Mountains know Old Ironhand. They know the evil ways of Four Flags, too. For five winters and summers I have been north, Canada, hunting and trapping. Even so far away, we heard of the crimes of Four Flags. No more talk. Rest awhile now.”

“I’ve got to go,” the trapper protested, wriggling on his elbows and accidentally falling back, a terrific jolt that made him cry out. “Got to go,” he repeated in a hoarse voice. “Catch that Little Joe …”

“In a day or two. No sooner.”

The Indian’s flat declaration angered the trapper again. Then a bolt of guilt struck him; he was being an ungrateful bastard. After licking a drop of coffee from his droopy mustache, he said, “I didn’t thank you proper yet. For taking care of my wound and all. For coming along when you did. That was a piece of luck.”

Manitow silently watched the ethereal mist drifting over the hidden peaks.

“Anyway—it’s a debt I owe.”

Manitow’s eyes, black and opaque, met his again. “I am sorry I did not come in time to stop the assassin. Fortunately he was a bad shot.”

“Little Joe has a big opinion of himself. I ‘spect he thought he couldn’t miss.”

“And I was coming close, so he couldn’t wait to find out. I was not far behind him, though approaching from a different direction. That’s why I didn’t see his sign, only heard his rifle. Until then I did not know there were two hunting you.”

Confusion was followed by a stab of fear. “Two? Who else …?”

Manitow stared.

“You? Why?”

“To see what kind of man you were. Are. I hold you responsible.”

“For what?”

“The death of my brother. The one who was your pardner.”

Ah, Christ, Christ,
Ironhand cried silently, stunned harder than he was when the rifle ball struck him.
He’s no friend. He saved me for the pleasure of killing me himself.

But there was no apparent hostility in the Indian’s speech or demeanor. He merely asked the trapper to give him a brief history of the quarrel that had led to his brother’s death, and the cowardly attack by the lackey of Four Flags.

“I’d have to go back a few years,” Old Ironhand said. “The summer rendezvous of ’28. I had quit as a brigade leader for the outfit a year before, but on good terms with Jaggers—we had an agreement that Four Flags would take all my plews and I’d work for no other.” Four Flags was a fur company as big and powerful as Astor’s. English, French, Russian, and American interests had pooled money to establish it. The boss west of St. Louis was Alexander Jaggers, who headquartered at Kirk’s Fort.

The annual summer rendezvous was a combination trade mart and revel, a great gathering where spring plews were sold, and trappers bought new equipment pack-trained out from St. Louis, all in the midst of much drinking and horse racing and woman swapping and other familiar entertainments of the frontier. Manitow said that before he went to Canada he had come down from the Wind Rivers several times, to the barren and unlovely Upper Valley of the Green, there to take part in the rendezvous himself. Ironhand didn’t remember meeting him, or hearing his name.

Speaking slowly, taking occasional sips of the cooling coffee, the trapper explained that it was at the summer rendezvous of ’28 that he saw his first black silk topper. A disreputable German merchant of traps, cutlery, and other metalware was wearing it. The hat was already hard-used, soiled by filthy stains, and pierced by a bullet front and back. Ironhand had quickly understood it was the enemy when the peddler said, “These they are wearing on the Continent now. Gents in the East are taking up the fashion. It’s the modern style, beaver hats will go out, you mark me. Also my cousin in Köln writes me to say inventors are perfecting machines to manufacture fine felting cheaply from all kinds of materials, even paper. This trade will die. Is dying now.”

The following two years confirmed it. In the great days, the high days of the trade, when Ironhand was still a brigade leader, the company paid as much as $9 a plew to certain free trappers to keep them working exclusively for Four Flags. By 1830 all was changed; average plews selling for $4 at St. Louis slipped to $3.75, no matter who trapped the animals. Then buyers at the summer rendezvous refused to go above $3.50. Ironhand was haunted by memories of the silk topper.

Alexander Jaggers was a short, prim Scot; a Glaswegian. A bachelor, his two passions were Four Flags and his religion. When he first came out to Kirk’s Fort in 1822, he had transported a compact gleaming Philadelphia-made pump organ on which he played and sang Christian hymns in a stentorian voice.

In 1831 Jaggers spoke to Ironhand about the price of plews. They were still dropping. Every free trapper working for Four Flags would have to accept $3, St. Louis, or further business was impossible. Ironhand refused.

Alexander Jaggers showed no visible anger, merely turned his back, swished up his coattails, sat at the organ, and began to play and sing “Saviour, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.” But to bring Ironhand in line, discipline him, show him his error, Jaggers’s henchman, Little Joe Moonlight, set on Ironhand’s pardner at the summer rendezvous.

Little Joe, a mustachioed weasel-chinned fellow, turned up with a couple of the bravos who frequently backed his most brutal plays. They cornered Ironhand’s pardner while the trapper was occupied with a comely Snake woman, the Snake women being universally conceded as the most attractive, and the most generous with their favors, of all the women of the many tribes.

Little Joe and his cronies pretended they were merely sporting with Tammany, hazing him, before the accident happened. As Ironhand learned afterward. Little Joe and his bravos seized the Indian’s wrist and swung him round and round in circles, cracking his arm like a whip. Tammany tried to fight them but the odds were wrong; he was soon reeling.

One of the bravos knocked the bung from a small whiskey keg and poured the contents over the Delaware. The bravos and Little Joe roared. But they swore ever afterward that the dousing was supposed to be the end of it. How the stray ember from a nearby cook fire accidentally fell on Tammany, igniting the spirits, was a mystery. Damn shame, but a mystery. Little Joe and his bravos fled the rendezvous before Ironhand could catch up to them. Ironhand’s pardner lived a day and a night, in broiled black agony, before the mercy of death.

Ironhand, who at the time went by his old name, left the encampment at once. He rode night and day for Kirk’s Fort, there to confront Alexander Jaggers, who never personally went to the rendezvous. Little Joe Moonlight had beaten Ironhand to the fort and was hovering in Jaggers’s quarters when Ironhand, full of drink, kicked the door down and leaped on the Scot to strangle him.

“Little Joe whistled up his bravos,” Ironhand said to Manitow. “They swarmed on me. Looking pious as a deacon, Mr. Jaggers said that in a spirit of Christian forgiveness, Little Joe would only break the hand I used least.”

He held up the twisted crooked fingers; Manitow had removed the dirty mitten while he slept.

The misshapen claw was sufficient to suggest the scene: Little Joe’s helpers knocking Ironhand to the floor, stomping him into a stupor. Little Joe slapping Ironhand’s outstretched arm over a table while the bravos held fast to the groggy trapper’s shoulders; the bravos had flung him to a kneeling position.

Gleefully, Little Joe raised a trade hatchet and smashed the blunt end of the blade on the outstretched hand. At the organ, his back turned to the mayhem, Mr. Jaggers pumped and sang:

We’ve a story to tell to the nations

That shall turn their hearts to the right! A story of truth and mercy!

A story of peace and light!

Little Joe Moonlight grasped Ironhand’s index finger, bent it, and broke it. Then he broke the middle finger. Next the ring finger. After a few more blows with the now-bloody hatchet, he broke the little finger. To Ironhand’s everlasting disgust, when Little Joe bent the thumb backward and that snapped, he screamed. More than once. Sweaty-cheeked, Mr. Jaggers pumped faster, and sang to drown the noise:

We’ve a song to be sung to the nations

That shall lift their hearts to the Lord!

A song that shall conquer evil

And shatter the spear and sword!

For the darkness shall turn to dawning …

He remembered his hand lying on the table like a bloody red piece of buffalo hump. He remembered starting to swoon.

And the dawning to noonday bright!

And Christ’s great kingdom shall come on earth,

The kingdom of Love and Light!

Then Ironhand heard Little Joe, his voice very distant, as though he were shouting in a windy cave. “You don’t need to play no more, Mr. Jaggers, he’s all done screaming.”

Little Joe lifted his head by the hair and let it fall,
thump …

Out of some perverse piety that governed him, Mr. Jaggers rushed Ironhand to a comfortable bunk in the fort barracks, and saw to it that he was given excellent treatment until he recovered his senses.

His hand, of course, was permanently maimed. This Mr. Jaggers totally ignored when he and Ironhand parted. Jaggers shook the trapper’s right hand— the left was already concealed by the first of many mittens. “The account book is closed, laddie.” It was not, but Ironhand was too enraged to do anything except glare. “We part as competitors, but eternal friends. Christ counsels forgiveness above all.”

“Forgiveness,” Ironhand muttered, waving his mitten in an obvious way. Mr. Jaggers merely beamed and pumped the other hand …